(29 Jan 2025)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Salah al Din Street, Central Gaza Strip – 29 January 2025
1. Various of cars loaded with belongings of displaced people waiting to cross to the north of the Gaza Strip
2. SOUNDBITE (Arabic) Motasem Jaber, from Beit Hanoun:
"Since yesterday at one o’clock in the afternoon, we slept here in the car in distress and fatigue, but thank God, God willing, today we will cross and we will not sleep tonight either. The suffering is difficult as you can see but the suffering is mixed with joy because we will return to our country and the north that is dear to us."
3. Various of cars loaded with belongings of displaced people waiting to cross
4. SOUNDBITE (Arabic) Salah Jaber, from Beit Hanoun:
"I have been here for more than 32 hours and I still have not reached Wadi Gaza. At one o’clock in the afternoon yesterday, I had not yet reached Wadi Gaza. We are suffering very hard. By God, we have not slept and have not tasted the taste of sleep."
5. Various of cars loaded with belongings of displaced people waiting before checkpoint
6. Various of Egyptian soldiers checking cars of displaced people
7. SOUNDBITE (Arabic) Nesreen al Khatib, from Beit Lahiya:
"I am an old woman, 60 years old. I am sitting in a tuk-tuk with my legs dangling and I slept in the cold tonight, without anything. I swear this is injustice. We live in injustice."
8. Various of cars loaded with belongings of displaced people waiting to cross to north of Gaza Strip.
STORYLINE:
Palestinians returning to northern Gaza in vehicles on Wednesday said the journey has been long, exhausting and treacherous.
In recent days, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have returned to northern Gaza, although their homecoming has been bittersweet as nearly everyone has friends or relatives who died, and many northern neighbourhoods have been devastated by more than 15 months of fighting between Israel and Hamas.
Some said they travelled over 24 hours and still hadn’t reached the checkpoint on Gaza’s main north-south highway.
Others, like Salah Jaber, ran out of fuel and had to push their vehicles.
Each car was packed high with mattresses and other belongings.
U.S. and Egyptian security contractors were screening Palestinian vehicles that were inching and idling toward northern Gaza on Wednesday under the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas.
The contractors are tasked with ensuring the vehicles carry no weapons through the checkpoint.
Pedestrians are allowed along the coastal Rashid Street without inspection.
But cars are required to take the traffic-clogged Salah al-Din Street and undergo screening where it crosses the Netzarim corridor, a military zone bisecting the territory just south of Gaza City that Israel carved out early in the war.
On Wednesday, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said that over 376,000 Palestinians had reached northern Gaza from the south.
Israeli forces withdrew Monday to let Palestinians head north in accordance with the 42-day ceasefire agreement that paused the Israel-Hamas war.
It was first time that many of these civilians who fled south in October 2023 — when Israel began its offensive in response to the militant group’s Oct. 7 attack — could return home.
AP video shot by Abdel Kareem Hana. Produced by Wafaa Shurafa
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